Ground-moving and excavating equipment employs shovels, buckets and similar equipment with which earth, gravel, rock formation and the like are excavated and moved around. For example buckets carry a lip along their digging edges, and the lips in turn mount digging teeth.
The digging teeth and their connections to the lips of the buckets are subject to the most wear and tear of the entire bucket because they are exposed to constant abrasion, impacts and the like. As a result, they require frequent replacement. Replacing the teeth in accordance with the prior art is relatively time-consuming, and the excavating equipment must sit idle during that time, which is undesirable because it ultimately reduces profits. Additionally, releasing connections of the prior art requires special tools and hammers which are undesirable for safety reasons as well as adding to the expense for maintenance of the earth moving equipment.
There are presently many variations of how the teeth are attached to the lips of the buckets or shovels. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,413,432, 6,032,390, 6,216,368 and 6,668,472, for example, disclose different approaches for securing teeth to the adapters and/or the adapters to the lip.
Connections that are used in the applications described above, typically have a pin with a fixed head or screw-on nut which has a wider diameter than the pin so as to retain the pin in the connection point once inserted into aligning holes of the respective portions of the parts to be connected. Because of the environment in which earth-moving equipment operates, namely dirt, abrasive and high wear operating environments, the traditional pin is not easily removed from the connection point in the traditional sense where it must be backed out of the connection given its fixed head or screw-on nut. The task to remove the pin, under ideal conditions is time consuming and requires special tools for extracting the pin.
Other connection types include for example connecting a tooling bit such as a digging tooth to an adapter which in turn connects to the lip of a bucket. This type of connection in the prior art employs a clamping part which sits in openings of the respective components and is forced against a locking component by use of a hydraulic fluid to firmly secure the adapter or tool to the lip or bucket respectively. The hydraulic fluid system is difficult to maintain, is subject to leaking and is subject to high amount of abrasion and wear and tear given the environment in which the components are used. The present invention improves upon the systems of the past and is able to provide pressure forces for locking and restraining components together without the necessity of multiple tools and hydraulic fluid components for quick release operation.
There continues to be a need for connection systems that do not suffer from the shortcomings of the prior art.